The unwanted vertical lines mentioned above do not exist on the documents themselves, but are caused by dust or other particles on the imaging guides in the scanner through which the document is imaged. Because the particles or dust are dynamic in nature, sensitivity or gain pattern correction methods used to “calibrate” the scanner will not address this problem. The particles will generally show up as black or white pixels at the same horizontal location in every or a majority of lines of the image (column artifact). These image artifacts make the scanned images more objectionable to a human viewer and cause the host-based optical character recognition (OCR) operation to be more difficult and error-prone. The contrast enhancement or adaptive threshold processing (ATP) signal processing steps that are used in binarizing the grayscale image can further aggravate the problem. Prior art methods for removal of VBLR scanner artifacts consisted of host “PC” processing of the scanner images, which if performed “on the fly”, effect scanner productivity. Another drawback of host VBLR processing is that in order to reliably detect and correct VBLR artifacts, the 8-bit grayscale image file needs to be available to the host (versus a bi-tonal image file) and image de-skew needs to be disabled.